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The great QR Code Reader search

Ever see those little barcode-like things on a business card that says you can import the entire business card into your phone just by "scanning this code"? Well I decided I wanted one on my iphone, so I began the great search for a QR Code generator and reader combination that would work to import my entire vCard information.

After searching around for about an hour downloading literally every free QR Code scanner on iTunes, I discovered I-Nigma and ZXing. Interestingly enough, it appears as though ZXing is simply using the Google Charts API to generate the QR Code, which means you could literally generate any QR Code by simply modifying this url.

I-Nigma reads these cards, and then allows you to save them directly to your phonebook. I'll now be adding a link to I-Nigma as well as my personal MECard on the back of all of my Business Cards from now on.

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Ever wonder how sites like battle.net support things like this in Google Chrome?

Well I did, so I did a little bit of digging. It turns out Google Chrome supports an open standard called Open Search. This format is relatively simple, and very easy to add to your own site. I just added it to some of our systems in under 5 minutes.

Adding OpenSearch to your site is incredibly simple, you just have to add a simple tag to your index HTML page, and add a simple XML file that it points to. The link tag looks like this:
<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="http://my-site.com/opensearch.xml" title="MySite Search" />

For a while, I have been creating command line tools provided right with boto which I used to manage AWS. Recently, others have become interested in these tools as well, and I've seen several other contributors adding to these tools to make them even more useful to others. One recent submission by Ales Zoulek added some nice features to my list_instances command, which I use on a regular basis to list out the instances that are currently active for my account in EC2.

Amazon now lets you add Tags to EC2 objects such as Instances and Snapshots. This allows you to actually "Name" your EC2 instance, as well as add some metadata that could be used for AMI initialization, etc. Ales added the ability to list these tags by name within the list_instances command line application:

Last week, Amazon announced the launch of a new product, DynamoDB. Within the same day, Mitch Garnaat quickly released support for DynamoDB in Boto. I quickly worked with Mitch to add on some additional features, and work out some of the more interesting quirks that DynamoDB has, such as the provisioned throughput, and what exactly it means to read and write to the database.

One very interesting and confusing part that I discovered was how Amazon actually measures this provisioned throughput. When creating a table (or at any time in the future), you set up a provisioned amount of "Read" and "Write" units individually. At a minimum, you must have at least 5 Read and 5 Write units partitioned. What isn't as clear, however, is that read and write units are measured in terms of 1KB operations. That is, if you're reading a single value that's 5KB, that counts as 5 Read units (same with Write). If you choose to operate in eventually consistent mode, you'r…